TV Review: Single Handed

There were plenty of reasons to suppose Single Handed (9pm, ITV) would be roughly as enjoyable as being doused with fish innards. It's a Sunday night drama, for a start. On ITV. And it launched in the middle of summer, fly-tipping season in TV-land, when programmers dump their duds into the schedules before naffing off on holiday for a month, knowing they won't have to watch.

If all that wasn't enough, it's a rural police show, set in a remote, coastal part of Ireland, about a good man, who cares. Ballykissheartbeat, anyone?

But Single Handed confounds expectations from the very beginning.

For a start, it was dark, not dreary. And slow, not stupid. There wasn't even a hint of Irish whimsy about it. No-one's eyes twinkled, humorously. No fiddly jigs and reels drifted from the pub.

And no-one – praise be – mentioned the damned craic.

In this introspective, downbeat drama, Owen McDonnell played Sgt Jack Driscoll, the sole garda in a great swathe of wild countryside. Hence that rubbish title.

He clocked up the miles, did Sgt Driscoll. You'd find episodes of Top Gear with less driving in them. He seemed to get behind the wheel between each and every scene.

Jack is the new cop on the block. Before him, his father was the local lawman. They're a chalk and cheese pair.

Jack is principled and by-the-book; Gerry is up to his eyes in murkiness. And the town where they live – a sprinkling of homes at the foot of a windswept, rain-lashed hill – is awash with secrets and lies.

Last night, Jack investigated the mysterious death of an Eastern European woman in a caravan.

"She was a little foreign tart," his father snapped at him, warning Jack to close the case and move on. Naturally, Jack ignored him and steadily unearthed all manner of unpleasantness around him, to the distant sound of sobbing from the Irish tourist board.

There was a whiff of western in all this. Jack was the new sheriff in town, while the guarded, furtive locals had faint echoes of the rotten townsfolk of Bad Day at Black Rock.

None of which seemed likely at 9pm.

In truth, it didn't always convince, and at two hours, it was needlessly drawn out. But it was an intriguing, moody drama, which sidestepped stereotype and closed with a truly cheerless twist.

For 120 minutes, the gathering gloom had been offset by a gentle love story between Jack and the only other newcomer to town, which built and built in the background, until Jack unwittingly slept with the sister he never knew he had.